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It’s a sad day for me, as I see an app that I liked a lot reaching the end of its financial rope. FitFu, the app that focused on getting you to work out during your spare time, is shutting its doors after launching in the latter part of 2010.

But what’s probably most interesting is Arnold’s comments under the announcement. He points out the demise of popular iOS mail app Sparrow, though it could be argued that a Google acquisition is far from “demise”.

“In some ways it’s been doing great – and at times the response had been pretty decent – but the App Store is not forgiving; even being at the top of Health and Fitness, assuming that can be sustained, is not such a good income.”

FitFu was an evolution product, spawned from PushupFu. It allowed you to work out against your friends, gathering points for exercises that you completed, which would be measured by your iPhone’s accelerometer. When we spoke to founder Jof Arnold in April of last year the team had just released a major revamp of the app, and even more recently version 3 saw daylight in August of this year.

Unfortunately, as sometimes happens, the money has run dry. According to the team, the only option is to shut it down:

“On Tuesday 18 September we will remove FitFu from sale and no further updates will come; if you haven’t updated to FitFu 3 and want to, you should do so before that date. We’ll keep the social network running until Wednesday 31 October, after which we’ll shut that down too”

Not that there is any lack of workout app choices in the App Store or elsewhere, but the team of FitFu always struck me as one of those groups that was destined for success. Fortunately, they might be, just not with this app. Such is life in technology.